Trump praises Gorsuch after confirmation

Senate confirms Gorsuch

Alfredo Watts
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20 April, 2017, 07:39

The Senate, which past year refused to consider Democratic former President Barack Obama's nominee to the court, voted 54-45 to approve Republican Trump's pick, Colorado-based federal appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch, to the lifetime job. Three Democrats facing reelection next year in states that President Trump carried easily in last November's election voted to confirm Gorsuch: Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), and Joe Donnelly (Ind.).

The nomination of Neil M. Gorsuch is confirmed.

On Monday, Senate Democrats secured enough votes to try to block the confirmation of Gorsuch, despite Republicans's goal to approve the candidate anyway.

The ultimate showdown was predictable.

Gorsuch is "going to make the American people proud", Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who led the opposition to Gorsuch, said he hopes the judge would heed concerns that the court is "increasingly drifting towards becoming a more pro-corporate court that favors employers, corporations and special interests over working America". His nomination will have a cloture vote.

SHAPIRO: On the highest profile cases that break down 5 to 4, the areas where Scalia was in the majority, I'm pretty sure Gorsuch will be and vice versa. It allowed most presidential nominees, including federal court judges, to pass on a simple majority, but it excluded Supreme Court picks.

Some Republicans even credit the Supreme Court vacancy as one reason Trump won the November election.

A graduate of Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, Gorsuch served as a Supreme Court law clerk and worked as a lawyer at the Washington law firm and at the Justice Department.

"Rarely has this body seen a nominee to the Supreme Court so well-qualified, so skilled, [with] such command of constitutional jurisprudence, with such an established record of independence and such judicial temperament", Sen. He joined the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, in 2006 where he remained until Friday afternoon. He served as an appellate judge for nearly two decades and was well-regarded in legal circles. How despicable, Republicans said, that the Democrats care so little about Senate tradition. However, there was another key factor, as well.

The U.S. Senate voted along party lines Friday to confirm President Donald Trump's nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court.

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) also released the following statement.

The rules change came after Senate Democrats successfully blocked his nomination with the filibuster in place.

Four times during his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch invoked a "breakfast table" analogy, telling senators that good judges set aside what they have to eat - and their personal views - before they leave the house in the morning to apply the law and nothing else to the facts of the cases at hand.

"In fact, under a certain scenario, there could even be more than that", Trump said.